SAN FRANCISCO — Joe Musgrove bounced back while the Padres took another step ahead.
Six days after one of the worst starts of his career — which went bad in a matter of a few minutes — Musgrove threw six scoreless innings in a rematch against the Giants on Saturday. And the Padres’ offense methodically added on to an early lead en route to an 8-0 victory at Oracle Park.
The win expanded their lead over the Diamondbacks to 1½ games in the race for the National League’s top wild-card spot and kept them 2½ games ahead of the Mets and Braves, who are tied for the NL’s sixth and final playoff spot.
The Padres also moved within 3½ games of the first-place Dodgers in the NL West.
“Yeah, it’s there,” Manny Machado said of the division title. “But I think that the biggest key to our team is that we have just been focused on today. We won the series today, but we gotta go out there and handle business tomorrow as well. … I think that’s the strength of this team. We take it inning by inning, at-bat by at-bat, pitch by pitch and game by game. That’s been a big success for us all year, and we’re going to continue to do it.”
The Padres scored a run in the first inning and another in the fourth against Giants rookie Mason Black before getting to the Giants’ bullpen for three runs in the sixth inning and three more in the eighth.
As the offense came up empty on multiple opportunities to make the game less tense early on, Musgrove made any failures moot.
It was similar to the dominance he displayed for virtually the entirety of his first five starts back from the injured list and how he began his start the previous Sunday.
Musgrove was facing the Giants six days after one of the more remarkable implosions imaginable, in which he went from retiring the first 10 batters he faced on a total of 37 pitches to surrendering six runs in a span of 10 pitches.
Musgrove altered his pitch mix, favoring his sweeper and curveball more than the cutter and four-seam fastball he threw a combined 57 percent of the time last Sunday and using those fastballs differently. He also did not throw as many strikes early in counts.
The result was his allowing three hits and striking out eight while walking none in his fourth quality start in his past five games. Even with the anomaly against the Giants, he has a 2.37 ERA in seven starts (38 innings) since returning from the elbow issues that sidelined him from late May until Aug. 12.
“It felt very similar,” Musgrove said. “Like, honestly, my stuff felt a little bit sharper than the last time I faced them, but I think we used the fastball a little better. We didn’t get overaggressive in the zone with it, but we used it as purpose pitches up and in. … I got hurt a couple times on the slider last week against them, so I kind of just went to my bread and butter stuff, and a little more cautious with the first pitches, trying to execute those a little, you know, a little more fine.”
Adrián Morejón pitched a perfect seventh, and Alek Jacob did the same in the eighth before stranding two runners in the ninth as the Padres closed out their second straight shutout of the Giants. San Francisco has not scored in its past three games.
A two-out run in the first inning came on Jurickson Profar’s single and Machado’s double to the wall in center field. Outfielder Heliot Ramos threw off-target toward the infield and Profar was waved home.
Xander Bogaerts’ solo homer in the fourth inning made it 2-0.
The Padres left a runner in scoring position in four of the first five innings before scoring three times in the fifth against Sean Hjelle.
A one-out double by Donovan Solano, one of his four hits and one of his three doubles on the night, started the big inning. With two outs, Luis Arraez’s single extended his hitting streak to 12 games and scored Solano. Fernando Tatis Jr. followed with a single, and Profar walked to load the bases before Machado grounded a single through the middle of the infield to score Arraez and Tatis and make it 5-0.
It was 6-0 after Arraez began the sixth inning with a double and scored on Tatis’ single. And it was 8-0 later in the sixth when Jackson Merrill’s second double of the game drove in Tatis and Profar, who had walked for the third time.
“Contributions one through nine,” manager Mike Shildt said after eight different Padres combined for 17 hits. “Everybody contributed. … Just relentless at-bats the whole way through.”
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